“Let’s talk.”
“Sure.”
He slides past me and drops into the single chair that my little office will accommodate. He closes the door. Obviously the police are here. I’m surprised he didn’t bring them along—surprised they didn’t insist. Obviously they are waiting downstairs. He will lead me down the elevator, one last favor, helping me avoid the humiliation of being taken out of the newsroom in handcuffs.
“Are you okay?”
He coughs nervously, and then studies me with those tragic eyes through the lenses of his fashionable glasses. Usually he wears contacts. Everybody who works in the newsroom ends up with glasses or contacts. Somehow I have managed to keep twenty-twenty vision. A sniffle I can’t avoid, however. My eyes are red. He only saw me cry once before, when my ex-wife left me. I pull myself up in the chair and say I’m fine.
“We need your files.”
I stare at him, my emotions quickly shifting to anger. The wave of emotions rumbling inside me has only partly to do with freedom of the press. I say nothing.
“I know what you’re going to say.” He wags a finger at me. “But this is the way it has to be. I talked to Kathryn and Mr. Sterling…”
“So we’re going to turn them over?”
He removes his glasses and wearily rubs the bridge of his nose. “Apparently the National Security Letter is real. Our compliance is mandatory.”
“What do our lawyers say?”
“This is what they say. We have to produce your notes and emails.”
“Are we going to write about this?”
He looks away, out my window toward the Nordstrom sign, then checks his wristwatch. I keep talking. “Aren’t you curious about what they’re after?”
“I need your notes.”
“The First Amendment…”
“Just stop.” He says it quietly, yet it carries more force than if he had slapped the desktop. I study his face, which looks drawn, gaunt. He looks as if he’s been crying. “Bring them to my office. I’ve got a two-thirty meeting. Please have them on my desk before I get back.”
He stands quickly and opens the door, then pauses. “For what it’s worth, I think this is shit. I tried. I really did.” Then he’s gone.
I sit for a long moment considering options. I have so many. There’s that nice flat in Paris where I could fly this afternoon, hide out, reinvent myself, drink wine, and write novels—all that, except I chose the wrong parents and the wrong career and there’s no flat in Paris.
I return to the Governor’s Library and fish out the files, half wishing that some of the building’s infamous rats had eaten them. Then I take the fire stairs down to advertising.
A couple of years ago I dated one of the classified sales reps. Carrie. I used to thank her for ensuring my paycheck; now, thanks to Craigslist and the shortsightedness of newspaper publishers, classified advertising has crashed. Carrie and I ended badly. Don’t fish off the company pier. But I need a copy machine that’s not in full view of the newsroom, and Carrie’s cubicle is on the other side of the room. At least I didn’t get her killed. She should come thank me. For the next twenty minutes I copy everything: handwritten notes, printed out email messages, story drafts, SEC documents. It looks boring as hell to me. Troy Hardesty was not that great a source.
We have so many ways to hurt you.
As the machine whirs and paper spits out the side, I try to make connections. The agents obviously killed Pam and her boyfriend. I was going to take the fall. If I had dozed a few moments longer, I’d already be in jail. Pam floats across my consciousness, without a face, without a pulse. I grip the sides of the machine. Cause and effect, damn it: They warned me. But I wasn’t writing about Troy. I sure wasn’t writing about Megan Nyberg. But I never called the number they gave me. I kept the notes and they killed Pam. And now the paper is giving up the notes, too. What is in there worth killing for? Apparently something connected to eleven eleven. Rachel warned me I was in danger. I study the scar congealing over the top of my hand.
We have so many ways to hurt you…
I return to the third floor using the fire stairs and take the back hallway into the business news department. There I wrap a rubber band around the copied records and slide them into a manila folder. Nobody said I couldn’t keep copies. They didn’t give me enough of a chance to read the National Security Letter to know if it’s a violation of executive order whatever-the-hell. I could ask the M.E. But I don’t. I slip the file into my briefcase. It’s a handsome Coach, black-leather job, and it was a Christmas gift last year from Pam. I latch it and walk out, carrying the original files under my arm, feeling nauseous.
I can count the strides it takes me to round the hallway and cross the main newsroom to reach the managing editor’s office. Thirty-five. Every one of them feels heavy and painful in my feet. I ease myself down into a chair at an empty cubicle and stare into the empty office. I am waiting for a reprieve that won’t come. The digital clock on his credenza reads 2:28 p.m. in red. The chiseled face of the reporter on the poster still calls for rewrite.
The chair creaks as I lean back and look over the newsroom. The air is heavy and overly warm like so many interior spaces in Seattle this time of year. I watch the clocks on the far wall, above the mural-sized world map. Reporters and editors walk past; others huddle over their keyboards, heads low in concentration, or lean back in chairs with telephone receivers cocked between their ears and shoulders. Most of them are my age or older. Every cubicle is decorated. Flags, awards, maps, bumper stickers, ancient Shoe comic strips, a Che Guevara T-shirt, coffee mugs of all provenances, badly dressed people with large, delicate egos and, sometimes, awesome talent. One copy editor has a large sign: “The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that the Titanic had a band.” Three dozen conversations going at once. And most of them are about the news. The excited energy flies around, ricocheting off the walls.
The newsroom at its best is a place of magic and conflict and profanity. It’s a room where Pulitzer-prize winning stories have been brainstormed, reported, written, and edited. Where a few of the best-known writers in America passed through on their way up. Where, every day, new news originates and goes out to the Northwest and the world, on paper and on the Internet. Read by nearly a million people every day.
And yet, at the moment, it suddenly all looks dead to me, as if I am looking back through time at a long-ago era, and hearing the sounds of ghosts. Suddenly everything is bathed in a sepia-toned sadness. The reporters and editors wear masks of sadness, their movements lethargic, the usual noise of the room replaced by a subdued haze. As I look around the room, I run my hands across the day’s edition, sitting there for me atop the otherwise empty desk, feeling the fine fiber of the p
aper. I suddenly know, a tactile premonition. It’s all gone. As gone as the reporter on the managing editor’s poster, with his press card stuck in the band of his fedora.